5 Penalty Areas for Indian Students in IELTS Reading

December 7, 2016Vaibhavi Karad

Being an Indian student, you may be facing some problems that restrict you from scoring high in the IELTS reading exam. You might be enrolled in a Hindi medium school or might lack of exposure to the advanced level of English during your past studies or work experience. Students, like you, struggle a lot to score high but it is not impossible for to achieve your dream score. Many students who come to know their weaknesses and work on them are able to overcome obstacles behind scoring high in IELTS reading module. Let us check out the top 5 penalty areas for Indian students in IELTS reading. Reading Passage Quickly
Time management is a crucial factor in order to succeed in the IELTS reading exam. Due to slow reading habits, it becomes cumbersome for some students to complete all the passages on time. They read slowly and take more time to understand the passage as well as solving the questions. This can be daunting in the exam since you get 60 minutes to solve 40 questions and there is no extra time for transferring answers also. So, improve your reading and scanning speed by reading articles from newspapers, magazines etc. and solving more practice tests. Advanced Level Vocabulary
In the IELTS reading exam, there are some words of which you may not be aware or may not know the exact meaning. It may become quite difficult to understand the text in such a case. It may so happen that you are not exposed to advanced vocabulary of English in your day to day life. It mainly happens in IELTS Academic reading passages where scientific language is used which is quite complex to understand. In this scenario, you should first try to learn the new words by reading newspapers and other textual materials or watch videos in foreign accent to learn new words. Secondly, you should try to guess the meaning of that word by reading the statement again carefully. Understanding Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is the most important skill required in IELTS in all the modules but with IELTS reading, it is extremely important since you get the questions in the paraphrased form. Such statements are though same in meaning but not in words since synonyms are used and this is why it becomes confusing for the students to find answers, especially in IELTS General reading exam. While finding their answers, you can understand paraphrasing and then solve those questions. Practice paraphrasing exercises at home to get used to it.True False Not Given Questions
If you ask any IELTS candidate about the difficult type of questions in IELTS reading, he will instantly respond saying those are True False Not Given questions. The reason is that these questions are very confusing, especially to the Indian students who find them difficult to exactly hit them right. They get confused when they first translate the statement in their local accent which does not work always, especially in tricky questions such as True False Not Given. For this, get used to the strategies and practice such questions more and more. Once you solve them, analysing them later on works wonder for your next attempt.Summary Completion Questions
Summary completion is the area where a lot of paraphrasing is there in the question which Indian students find difficult to relate with the passage in IELTS reading. Apart from paraphrasing, synonyms are the other obstacles they face while trying to understand the question and the related passage. Again, practicing such questions, trying exercises on paraphrasing and reading a lot of textual materials such as journals, magazines, newspapers etc. is helpful.